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Friday, October 09, 2015

Stephen Hawking on Automation

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking's latest prediction
involves neither colonizing aliens nor malicious artificial intelligence – just
plain old human greed. The scientist was commenting on so-called technological
unemployment, a trend of automation taking over the jobs that previously
required humans. According to some estimates, in a matter of decades robots may
become better and cheaper than humans in most tasks and make most of the human
workforce unemployable.

Hawking believes that in such a scenario we should expect
not prosperity but drastic economic inequality in the future.

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will
depend on how things are distributed,” he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session. “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the
machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if
the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far,
the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing
inequality.”